Sanna Pederson, who specializes in German music history and culture in the nineteenth century, has been the Mavis C. Pitman Professor of Music at the University of Oklahoma since 2001. Her most recent work focuses on chamber music in Berlin from 1870-1910, and studies specifically the concerts of the Joachim Quartet. Other interests include the aesthetic theories of Richard Wagner: she has published on the roles of love, sex, and gender in Wagner’s writings and has eleven articles in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Other papers and publications have dealt with romanticism, the term absolute music, and the history of musicology. Earlier research focused on the reception of Beethoven, on which she has published with regard to nationalism, gender studies, narrative theory, and historiography.
Her dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania was on “Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800-1850.”
She has taught graduate seminars on Aesthetics, Beethoven and Schubert, the Classical Era, Romanticism, Chamber Music, and the Symphony.
In 2005-06 she was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies, and was on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society from 2007-2013.
